Trio of Brazilian Researchers Visit Prof. Redmiles’ CRADL Lab

Marco Aurelio Gerosa, an associate professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), arrived at UCI in July with two of his Ph.D. students, Igor Steinmacher and Igor Wiese, both of whom are also lecturers at the Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR), Campo Mourão.  ISR Prof. David Redmiles is pleased to be hosting the three Brazilian researchers this year at his Collaboration Research in Action, Design, and Learning (CRADL)Laboratory.  “We are already having exciting collaborations around the theme of global software engineering as a social networking enterprise,” says Redmiles.

Gerosa is on sabbatical this year and opted to spend his time at UC Irvine because of its solid reputation and prominent researchers in the fields of software engineering and CSCW, and especially on the intersection of these two areas.  UCI has a long history of research bridging these two research areas.

Gerosa’s research focuses on software engineering and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), including empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, software evolution, and social dimensions of software development. Recently he’s worked on mining sociotechnical information from software repositories to improve the identification of logical dependencies between artifacts, to uncover test characteristics that indicate source code quality, and to discover gamification opportunities for virtual communities.   

Igor Steinmacher’s main research goal is to investigate how to facilitate the onboarding of newcomers to open source software (OSS) projects.  He combines empirical methods to identify factors that hinder to newcomers.  While at UCI, he is interviewing experienced open source software developers and conducting qualitative analysis on this data to identify hindering factors.  The next steps of this research include (a) finding out the mechanisms – mainly awareness mechanisms – that support newcomers in overcoming the identified factors and (b) conducting a series of experiments to assess the effectiveness of these mechanisms. 

Igor Wiese’s current research concerns investigating to what extent social metrics can predict source code artifacts changes. He is also interested in discovering sociotechnical factors that influence the results of this prediction.  Preliminary results indicate that social metrics can improve the results when combined with architectural and process metrics.  The goal now is to use regression models to better understand how each dimension contributes to change proneness.

All their research is connected to the NAWEB project (http://nap.usp.br/naweb/), an institutional multi-disciplinary research project supported by the Provost’s Office for Research of the University of São Paulo.  Its main goal is to develop and support collaborative environments on the web.  The research team, headed by Gerosa, is interested in new international collaborations.  The timing is very appropriate, since the Brazilian Government is heavily investing in attracting foreign visitors from all levels, from senior researchers to post doctorate, from short stays to long stays, with monthly subsistence payments. The program is called “Science without borders” (http://www.cienciasemfronteiras.gov.br/web/csf-eng/).  

Prof. Gerosa is visiting UCI until July 2014; his students are staying until mid-January.  Prof. Gerosa is can be found in his UCI office, 5228 DBH.  For more information, visit http://lapessc.ime.usp.br/.